project/stunt-story
Jennifer Egan,
Percival Everett,
James Salter,
Miranda July,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Ingmar Bergman,
Mavis Gallant,
Clifford Odets,
Jenny Erpenbeck,
Jay McInerney
Until he could no longer write letters, Gabriel's uncle nagged him with useless advice. Most of it was about money. Owing to Gabriel's inability to produce his father's marriage certificate (in fact, he never tried), his uncle could not in all conscience leave him Baum possessions. It was up to Gabriel, therefore, to look after his own future. He begged Gabriel to find a job with some large, benevolent international firm. It would give him the assurance of money coming in, would encourage French social-security bureaucrats to take an interest in him, and would put him in the way of receiving an annuity at the age of sixty-five.
“Sixty-five is your next step,” his uncle warned, for Gabriel's thirtieth birthday.
lmao
[have some of the financial insecurity stuff in stunt]
“That sign was the end of life as we knew it in the sixties,” said Dieter Pohl. He was a colonel now, and as fussy as a monarch at a review about a badge misplaced or a button undone. Gabriel had no equivalent staircase to climb; who ever has heard of a victim's being promoted? Still, he had acquired a variety of victim experiences. Gabriel had been shot, stoned, drowned, suffocated, and marked off for hanging; had been insulted and betrayed; had been shoved aboard trains and dragged out of them; had been flung from the back of a truck with such accidental violence that he had broken his collarbone. His demise, seen by millions of people, some eating their dinner, was still needed in order to give a push to the old dishonorable plot — told ever more simply now, like a fable — while Dieter's fate was still part of its moral.
omg lol
Dieter heard that a thirteen-hour television project about the Occupation was to be launched in the spring; he had seen the outline.
He said, “For the moment they just need a few people to be deported and to jump off the train.”
Some old-timers heard Dieter say, “They want to deport the Poles,” and some heard, “They are rounding up the foreign-born Socialists,” and others swore he had asked for twelve Jews to be run over by a locomotive.
lmao
Gabriel supposed that Dieter was right, in a way. Certainly, he was at a bad age for dangerous antics. It was time for younger men to take their turn at jumping off moving vehicles, diving into ice-cold streams, and dodging blank shot; nor had he reached that time of life when he could die blessing and inspiring those the script had chosen to survive him. As an officer, doomed to defeat, he would at least be sure of his rank and his role and of being in one piece at the end.
stunt!!
Have you read Deleuze and Guattari? she asks, and I have to hide a smile; she hasn’t acquired the defensive veneer that would prevent her from asking open-ended questions like that. There is something so earnest about her, a yearning for connection on some other plane than the everyday, or that she’s not getting on an everyday basis. I take a wild guess that her partner has not read Deleuze and Guattari, and that she wishes he did.
channel earnestness
At that moment of seeing Victoire childlike on that bench I could have caught myself, freed myself with even the mildest allusion to Lolita, but the fact of the matter was that it was not her youth that attracted me. In fact, I am not even certain that what charmed me was all that genuine, that being her guiltlessness, her irreproachability, either of which were constructions of mine or hers. It really wasn’t that I wanted her, but that I wanted what she had, a kind of freedom, a purity of spirit. It was a sort of integrity, something that I strived for but had lost through so many years, maybe never had. I wanted what she had the way I wanted to draw the way my daughter drew when she was four, when that tangle of lines was an elephant, an elephant that I could not see, but an elephant. I recalled how brokenhearted I was when one day she crumpled up her picture and complained that it didn’t look like an elephant at all. Victoire allowed me to see that simple bench as it was, as more than what it was, and I was happy for it. I loved her for it. I sat on it beside her and felt the smoothness of it under my palms, attended to the coolness of it.
interesting that i didn't save this either!
I heard her move around the room, but I kept my eyes closed. She told me I could open them and I did. Against the wall pinned to a foam-core board that leaned against the wall was a watercolor. The paper was about twenty by thirty inches. The work was green, green leaning into blue in places, edged with blood in the southeast corner. It was abstract, stunning. It was so unlike the country scenes and cityscapes of hers that I had seen before. The painting was rich, dense, and deep. Too deep, I thought, for a work on paper, no matter how heavy the stock, too rich to be anything but oil colors, but it was surely watercolors. I was surprised by it, confused by it. I began to cry.
“Do you like it?”
“Did you make this?” I asked.
“You think a young, pretty French girl cannot paint this picture?”
“I don’t believe anyone could make this picture. How did you do it?” I wanted to get up and walk over to it, to get right up on it, but I also did not want to end the experience I was having with it. “I love it.”
“Why are you here with me?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
“Victoire, you are a beautiful young woman. Men are drawn to you. Men your age. I’m an old married man. I have two children. I live in another country. I can offer you nothing.”
“That’s not true,” she said.
“How is any of that not true?”
“First of all, I don’t want anything from you. Except you.”
“That’s my point. You can’t have me,” I said. “I’m not going to leave my wife and children.”
“But I do have you, don’t I? You are right here beside me, eating the same croissant, looking at the same overstated church. We lie in the same bed, breathe the same air.”
crazy that i didn't save this either omg
“Suppose,” I said, “we were together. Just for the sake of argument, imagine it. I will die long before you.”
“And then I will be sad before having a happy rest of my life. I will find another man. Maybe another old man like you. Maybe a younger one.”
Her answer was so clean, so perfect, so smart. “Of course,” I said. I reached over and held her hand.
“I told you. You do love me. Tu es mon beau ténébreux.” She leaned over and placed her head against my shoulder. It was an agreeable feeling, a nice weight. I would later confess to myself, sadly, that everything she had said I wanted to hear. I studied the top of her beautiful twenty-two-year-old head, peered through her hair, through her unblemished scalp, through her bone and into her brain, and loved her, wanted her to feel loved. More precisely, I wanted her to feel loved by me. It sounded as stupid then as it does now.
ahhhhh
The women excused themselves and left us on the patio.
“You dog,” Richard said. “You’re not going to say that this isn’t what it looks like.”
“No, I’m afraid it’s exactly what it looks like. A goddamn train wreck.”
“The daughter? How old is she? Twenty-five?”
“Twenty-two.”
“What about the mother?” he asked.
“What about the mother?”
“She’s beautiful, in case you hadn’t noticed. And she knows?”
“Yes.”
Richard whistled. “To the French,” he toasted.
“I’m an idiot,” I said.
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Take my word,” I said.
OR THIS lolllll